Hacker News Reader

clintoncon Ask HN: Coding assignments for kids

Three things which worked for me when I was a kid:

- Games - Pretty pictures - Music

Someone suggested python processing. This might be cool. Also, pygame can be fun. For games, you could introduce the kid to the game of Nim, learn a strategy to always win, and the kid can program the strategy. Make it a real game that someone might load up and play, with whatever graphics, sound, and experience the kid wants.

Having the computer be the blackjack dealer would be another option.

clintoncon Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide

My rationale for single quotes is also that JSON chose for you -- if you have JSON-formatted strings in your javascript and you use single quotes for your strings, you don't have to escape the double quotes.

clintoncon Google has quietly launched a GitHub competitor

Well, it could last ten years, like Google Code did. :P

clintoncon Show HN: A Repo of JavaScript Coding Challenges

I really like the approach of cloning the repository and writing to the tests!

clintoncon Ask HN: At what proficiency do you consider 'knowing' a language?

For example, 'if x == None' versus 'if x is None'. The latter is to be preferred (since identity is faster and more clear than comparison), but you see the former sometimes.

clintoncon Show HN: PEP – an idea to help bring password managers to the masses

PEP generally stands for Python Enhancement Proposal -- PEP 8 isn't the only one.

clintoncon Show HN: A mathematical solution to any Game of Life variation

It appears that he wrote a parametrized game of life simulator. Not particularly mathematical. Not particularly general, either; the three numbers are extracted as parameters (so still a square grid in two dimensions, where persistence is based on counting immediate neighbors).

clintoncon Google's Corporate Login

eye roll

What is the purpose of a non-"web 1.0" login page? This is not to win customers; it's supposed to work. And for thousands and thousands of employees every day, this works just fine.

clintoncon Ask HN: Does the valley really have Engineer shortage?

Maybe by "simple" he only means "without IntelliSense" :)

clintoncon Ask HN: Does the valley really have Engineer shortage?

It's not about making an uncomfortable environment; it's a recognition that a program is 90% written before you should ever fire up your editor.

What is meant by "full potential" here? You are not expected to write a hundred lines of code, or get something working end-to-end. The goal is to see if you can see to the core of something more complex than a for loop. If you can, you ought to be able to explain that to a colleague in a person-to-person manner, including some syntactically-passable code. Believe it or not, a whiteboard is pretty much to most efficient way to do that.

clintoncon Hilbert: A Latex-like math-oriented programming language

The information on the pretty website is spare. However, there are a few issues which give me pause.

The integral example already given is one. One must wonder what is going on "under the hood" to give such a result. My hypothesis is that Riemann sums are what's going on, and that the integral uses 0 as a sample point. An interesting point is that this is one of the unit tests. https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/test/inter...

Another is the example of lim[x->0] 1/x => oo. This is not true; the limit does not exist. If one said lim[x->0+] => oo there would be a better case. Also a unit test. https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/test/inter...

(1 2 3; 4 5 6) * (1 2 3) => (14 32) is not how matrix multiplication is normally done. ( (1 2 3) would need to be (1; 2; 3).)

All in all, the grammar seems to be quite irregular; it seems to be the result of a sequence of wanting to solve one very particular kind of problem (take a limit, differentiate a function, take a sum) and cludging it into the parser.

https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/lib/hilber... has seven exclamation marks in a row. That's amusing... I don't know anything about Ruby, but I feel that it must be a joke.

clintoncon Show HN: Momentum – a personal dashboard that eliminates distraction

This is really thoughtfully done. I like it. :)

clintoncon How a password changed my life.

How beautiful. It's easy to forget how little everyday goals really can make your life better.

clintoncon The US economy shrank at an annualized rate of 2.9 percent in Q1

Math pedant to the rescue! Actually, rates combine in a multiplicative way -- losing 3% and then 4% does not lose 7%, (though it's close). What if the economy lost 1% each day for a year? It would not lose 365%.

If we assume the annualized rate, the economy would be 97.1% of its current size in a year. The fourth root is 99.267%, so the economy shrank about 0.733% this quarter. If it does so for four consecutive quarters, it will decrease by 2.9%.

I know that's what you said in the first place, but when extrapolating further into the future, it makes a difference.

clintoncon Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

40 hours of work per week!? Eight hours a day, five days a week, for every class?

clintoncon Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

This article is about adjunct instructors, who are not paid per hour -- they are paid a fixed amount per course. Average pay is $3000 per course [1]. Teaching four courses in a semester is a full-time job; this gives $24,000 per year, usually without benefits. Institutions tend to limit the number of courses assigned to each adjunct in order to avoid the adjunct being classified as a full-time employee.

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/Adjunct-Project-Shows-Wide/1364...

clintoncon Android user sues Apple for not delivering texts after she ditched her iPhone

Yeah, I noticed the same. I believe that I fixed it by changing my iCloud password so that my old phone was not authorized to receive iMessages anymore.

clintoncon Weierstrass functions: continuous but not differentiable anywhere

Not sure what you mean by this, since your comment has no context -- there are no limits or sums in the link. However, even the humble Riemann integral would be able to find the area under the graph of a bounded function on a compact interval which is continuous on a set of full Lebesgue measure. Any other function only has a "well-defined area" for some seriously stunted notion of area; you can integrate more functions with a different integral, but what one calls a "well-defined area" pretty much depends on what kind of integral you're using at that point.

clintoncon Illustrated Sorting Algorithms

Well, Quick Sort is O(n log n) on average, but you know that. Also, anything that's O(n log n) is also O(n^2), which means that the author is the worst kind of correct -- but you knew that too :)

clintoncon Detecting duplicate images with Python

Googling "perceptual hash" yields http://www.phash.org/

clintoncon Patatap

Before you press the space bar, "nowisthetimeforallgoodmentocometotheaidoftheircountry" sounds like the music they used to play early in the mornings on VH1...

clintoncon Visual walk through of Euclid's proof of the Pythagorean theorem

Also, if you hover over the geometric objects in the proof (like an AB or ABC), the corresponding object is highlighted in the figure.

clintoncon Linux Commands In Structured Order with Detailed Reference

I did not know about the "last" command. Very cool resource.

clintoncon New Record Mandelbrot Set Zoom – 10^275 in 5 mins (video)

10^275 whats? Also, who keeps track of these records? Who verified the accuracy of the zoom?

Sorry, "self-proclaimed" records get me a little grumpy...

clintoncon Only 90s Web Developers Remember This

Man, I loved buttons.

This post made with vim.

clintoncon Ask HN: Any one making a living selling WP themes?

Do you sell your themes from your own site?

clintoncon Swatch Internet Time

Handy tip: one .beat (or a milliday, if you like) is about 1.5 minutes. This means that one percent of one day is about fifteen minutes. Try thinking of tasks in terms of percentages of a day. You spend about 30 percent, give or take, sleeping. You spend 30-40% working most days. How does one spend the remaining 30-40%? One percent showering. Three or four percent preparing meals. Adds up.

clintoncon GNU Octave 3.8

A GUI!? Oh, my stars...

Honestly, I like Octave a lot, and this new feature gives me the option to use it in collaboration with folks who aren't as UNIX-happy as I. I'm interested to know how "unpolished" the GUI is.

clintoncon Convex Optimization (MOOC) by Stephen Boyd

From the web page:

Do we need to purchase a Matlab license to take this course?

You will be able to use Matlab under a special license provided to you as a course participant to use for the CVX101 course. This is a limited license for the duration of the course and is intended to be used only for course work and not for commercial purposes. Alternatively, you may choose to access Matlab via a web interface if you prefer not to install Matlab on your computer.

clintoncon Scientist who faked data in his thesis will keep his Ph.D.

So, what are the criteria of "scientifically valid" theses these days?

I would have preferred a statement like, "After discarding all parts which relied upon the fabricated data, the resulting thesis is still acceptable to the committee as a doctoral thesis." However, I feel bad about all the Ph.D.'s out there who may feel they have to defend the integrity of their work. (Mine is in pure math; fabricated data is not a big worry for us :D )